


three days.

by outpastthemoat



Series: new testament [just more of the same 'verse] [15]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 02:09:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1327978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes Dean thinks the biggest mistake of his life was teaching Cas how to drive.<br/>I didn't really proof read this so apologizes for any weird stuff you find.</p>
            </blockquote>





	three days.

_I got three days to wash the road out of my soul_

_I got three days to love you out of control_

_And I wish I had a lifetime to hold onto you this way_

_Love can do some healing in just three days_

 

Sometimes Dean thinks the biggest mistake of his life was teaching Cas how to drive.  He'll come back from a hunt and the house will be empty and echoing with the curious kind of silence that fills all the spaces of a home when no one has walked through its doors in a week, when there's no one there to crack the windows or brew a cup of coffee or warm the bed or walk through the halls.  When the lock sticks on every door.  When there is no one waiting to welcome you home.  

He comes home that night and Cas isn't there.  He leaves the Impala running and the headlights on, illuminating the porch steps.  He wrestles with the locks on the front door and reaches inside the house to turn on the porch lights and stands there squinting in the sudden brightness until his eyes adjust.  Then he walks through the house with his gun in his hand, turning on the lights in every room, the kitchen and the library and the upstairs bathroom.  He swipes a finger across the windowsill in every room.  

He opens the door to the bedroom Cas shares with him, and he finally drops the gun.  He stands there for a moment, just looking: at the water stains on the wallpaper, at the bundle of dirty clothes on the floor beside the bed.  Cas had made the bed before he left, but he hadn't closed the curtains over the windows.  Dean lays the gun on the nightstand and slides the curtains shut.

He unloads the trunk and dumps his bags and weapons on the kitchen table and even though it's a little after midnight and he's running on fumes he takes the time to take apart each gun, wipe down each knife, unpack the bloodstained shirts and toss them in the laundry.  When he's done, he stands up and walks down those silent halls to the bedroom.  He thinks about turning down the sheets.  He doesn't.  He takes off his boots and dumps them on the floor next to the pile of dirty clothes.  He switches on the tv and puts his keys and wallet on the nightstand.  He throws his duffel bag in the closet and finds that Cas has moved the trenchcoat to their closet.  Not hung up or anything, just dumped on the floor underneath the button-downs and suit jackets Dean’s made a habit of ironing and hanging up.  He kicks the trenchcoat further back into the closet, underneath a pile of jeans so he won’t have to look at it.  He lies on top of the covers without pulling them down and tries not to mind the quiet too much.

Cas still isn't there in the morning.  He makes coffee anyway, to make the house feel lived-in again.  It doesn't really work.  He clatters through the house, making as much noise as he can.  He slams drawers and lets doors fall shut on their own and shoves dishes in the cabinets without minding particularly if they rattle, if the cabinet hinges squeak.  He tells himself he's used to it, this quiet.  It's not like Cas's presence causes the house to come to life.  Cas creates his own silences wherever he goes.  He tells himself that it's just as well that Cas isn't around.  But he can't quite shake the feeling that for all his rattling and stomping around and shaking things up, all his empty rattling noises are just the same as the silent spaces Cas creates.  

He drags Cas's radio to the kitchen and leaves it playing through the open door as he goes out outside to stare at the roof. They had come back to the house one day and found that a wind had passed through South Dakota and had taken most of the shingles along with it.

“Entropy,” Dean had said grimly to Cas, and Cas had almost, but not quite, managed to keep himself from rolling his eyes. Dean has often found himself complaining to Cas about entropy, his archenemy in South Dakota.  Entropy, he tells Cas, is responsible for the water damage on the ceiling of their room, on their walls. No, Cas had said right back, that was you and your half-hour showers.  Entropy, Dean maintains, is also responsible for the weeds coming up between the cracks forming on the new-laid concrete driveway; entropy is responsible for the damaged breaks on the Impala and the slow, steady decline of the Nova’s tires. Dean likes a good fight, but this constant struggle against entropy has worn him down.   He thinks sometimes that's he's finally ready to give up, call it quits.   

“Fuck it,” Dean had said, surveying the damage on the roof, and Cas had looked at him strangely.  

“Dean?”

"Let's just let it go to hell," Dean said.  "The house. The yard. Your garden.  Every goddamned thing."

“Aren’t we going to fix it?” 

“There's no point,” Dean said, and Cas had shaded his eyes with his hands and frowned at him.  

"You're wrong," Cas said.  "There's a point. The point is to not get wet when it rains and the roof leaks."

"You do it, then," Dean had said. It had all come out in a hot furious rush, and thinking about made him feel shamed and guilty and resentful, later.  "I'm tired of doing everything around here.  You never think of me.  You’re lost in your own head, in your own misery and you’ll never let me in. I could help you, you know.”

“I’m not miserable.”

“You do a shitty job of acting happy, then.  It's like you really don’t care.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep saying that,” Cas said.  “It’s not true.”

“Well, you don’t,” Dean said.

“Yes, I do.”

Now Dean stares at the roof and thinks about Cas's hurt look, thinks about throwing his hands up over the ordeal.  He stands in the driveway and drinks a beer slowly and stares at the empty spaces on the roof and it's quiet, even with the radio on.  It's quiet, even once Cas comes back from his hunt late that night, limping and hunching his shoulders with each step.  He has blood and dirt streaked across his face and arms and chest; he smells like sweat and smoke and he looks at Dean tiredly when Dean opens the door without a word and tries to take the duffel out of Cas's hands.  Cas hangs on grimly, even though his legs are shaking with exhaustion.

"Are we fighting?" Cas asks him.  "Is this a fight?"

Dean pauses.  "I don't know," he answers.  He thinks about it. He's not sure what he's angry about.  The only word that comes to mind is  _everything,_ and he doesn't know why. "I'm still mad at you," he says.

"No, I'm mad at  _you_."

"Okay, then," Dean tells him, "we're fighting," and Cas abruptly slumps over where's he's standing and lets go of the duffel bag. Dean lets the bag drop to the floor.  He takes Cas's shoulder instead and helps him hobble up the stairs.

Dean steers him into the bathroom.  Cas sits on the edge of the bathtub as Dean crouches on the floor between his knees and wipes blood off his arms, blood off his hands, blood and dust and graveyard dirt off his face. He leans into Dean’s shoulder and breathes nosily in Dean’s ear, an alarming, rattling noise in the quiet between them.  That sound makes Dean's heart go taunt and tight with worry and alarm.  He knows what it means, this tightness in his chest, this heavy crushing weight of protectiveness and worry and fear.  He knows what he feels for Cas. He knows what it means.

"I'm tired," Cas says into Dean's shoulder, over and over.  "I know," Dean tells him, every time.  "I know. I know."  Cas shakes his head and repeats those words when Dean asks him if he wants to take a shower.  So he takes off Cas's shoes and wipes his dusty feet with a damp washcloth and checks out Cas's ankle.  He sees that it is red and swollen, and he wraps it up with gauze and tape.  He catches himself whistling some quiet tuneless song as he winds strips of gauze around Cas's ankle, something to fill the silence.  He stops.

Cas climbs into bed next to Dean and they don’t talk about it. Or about the way Cas places his head on Dean’s pillow. "I’m still mad at you," Cas mutters in his ear, but he settles into a firm long line of warmth against Dean's side.  Maybe they’re still fighting, but Dean still crawls under the covers next to him and kisses his hair, letting the strands of fine dark hair tickle his lips. It’s important that Cas understand that even though they’re fighting that Dean still cares about him. Still loves him. Even if he can’t say so, not out loud.  Not right now.  It’s a luxury, after all, having a chance to just be mad at each other. 

Cas shifts restlessly in his arms until Dean finally gives up and pulls away.  Cas stretches his arm out across the middle of the bed, palm facing out, fingers curling in on themselves.  Dean’s left hanging on the edge of the bed.  He pulls at the blankets, edges down until his feet are at the very bottom of the mattress and his head is just under Cas’s arm.  He listens to Cas breathing and thinks about how that small noise fills up the room.  He thinks that this is what he has been missing, the sound of quiet breathing there by his side, the rustle of sheets and blankets, the the sound of Cas turning over, Cas’s soft sighs.  

He wakes up in the night hearing Cas crying out.  He sits up, leaning on his arm.  “Hey,” he says quietly, and Cas goes silent.  "You all right?"

"I kicked you," Cas grunts.  "It hurts."

"How bad?"

"Bad."

"Want the bed to yourself?"

"No," Cas says. He listens to Cas breathing for a while, and that might’ve almost put him to sleep if Cas hadn’t suddenly said, “I missed sleeping next to you.”

“Oh, yeah?” 

"It's too quiet without you.  I couldn't sleep," Cas says.  He's drumming his fingers against the iron rungs of the headboard until Dean reaches over and stops him.  He takes Cas's hand and drags it up to his chest and holds it there, twining their fingers together.  

"Dean," he says unhappily.  "What am I doing wrong?"

He tightens his hold on Cas's hand.  "Nothing, buddy," he says.  He feels, suddenly, so, so old, and very tired.  "Not a thing." 

He wakes up and Cas isn't there.  There is a cold empty spot next to him where Cas’s arms and legs and body should be, and Dean wonders at that a little, until he falls back asleep.

\--

Cas leaves and comes back and and Dean doesn’t like it; he’s gotten used to always seeing Cas, right there in the corner of his eye, never far out of sight.  He can feel Cas's absence digging at him all the way to the bone.  

Jody takes one look at him and understands. "You're pining," she says.  She says she has a solution.   “No,” he says immediately, when Jody asks.  “Come on, Jody, I’ve got too much to do, I’m always going on the road, there’s no way.”  But he goes to the meetings and then he goes through the training and he ends up with a letter in his hand anyway.  He hands it to Cas first thing the next time he comes home, before Cas even has a chance to walk inside or set his bags down.  "I've got something to tell you," he says.

Cas reads it, and frowns.  “Dean?”

"I'm going to be a volunteer firefighter," he says. He squirms under Cas's startled look.  "Jody thought it would be a good idea."

"Is this something you want to do?" Cas asks.

He hesitates, but yeah. It is.  "Yeah," he admits.  He isn't prepared for the slow smile that Cas turns on him.  "Then I'm glad," he says, and for a while Dean discovers that he doesn't mind the quiet so much when he can escape to the station for his monthly shift, since the station is loud and warm and comfortable and crawling with loud, warm human bodies making all kinds of companionable noise, but when he finally gets back home it's always the quiet that's waiting up for him and never Cas.   

He wakes up every morning and the first thing he thinks is always, It's too quiet, and then, He's not here.  Cas comes and goes and Dean lets him, even though he knows that Cas's absence will leave the house silent and still, even though he knows that Cas's absence leaves him quiet and aching.   He misses Cas. He does.  Missing Cas makes him do odd, unsettling things.  He lays down pillows across the empty side of the bed, he leaves the radio playing while he falls asleep.  He crawls into the closet and pushes clothes around until he finds the trenchcoat.  He pulls it out carefully, lays it flat on the floor, and brushes out the worst of the wrinkles before placing it on a hanger and putting it next to his suits.

Cas leaves and the house is silent.  Cas comes back and sometimes it seems like everything is almost perfect, but there's still something missing, and Dean can't put his finger on it.  

It’s too quiet, he complains to Cas, who looks at him calculatingly and then suggests they get a dog.  It's too quiet around here, Dean just says again.  You should sing something, he tell Cas, but Cas maintains that he can’t sing. Dean thinks it’s probably more that Cas refuses sing, for reasons he keeps to himself.  He knows Cas knows all the words to his cassettes by now.  He knows, because Cas has developed a latent precognitive ability to change the radio station within seconds of hearing the opening chords to “Dust in the Wind.”  

He starts whistling to fill the silence.  He plays loud music and whistles along with it, out in the yard, out on the porch.  Cas looks at him oddly the first time he catches Dean with his arms braced against the Impala's hood, still whistling that tuneless song that maybe something sung by the Beatles, maybe something sung by Beyonce; he doesn't know.   "What?" Dean demands.  

"You're whistling," Cas says, frowning.  

"Yeah," he says.  "What about it?"

"Do you have to?" Cas asks.

"Yeah," he says.  "It's something you do."  It's one of those days when it seems like things are almost perfect.  In these days Dean learns things about Cas, learns the way his hair curls on the nape of his neck with sweat, learns the way he tastes after drinking warm beer.  He kisses those curls on the roof of the porch, slightly drunk and flushed from midday heat, he drags his nose against Cas's stubble and kisses Cas on the side of his mouth.  He finds Cas in the garage and kisses him all the way through the kitchen to their room.  Dean drags him under the Nova up on blocks, and kisses him there too.  He thinks if this is fighting, then maybe a little bit of it isn't too bad.  So what he doesn't say is, It's something you do when you're working.  When you're waiting for something to be over. When you're bored.  What he says is, "It's something you do when you're happy."  

"When you're happy?" Cas repeats.

"Yeah," he says.  "Why?"

"I don't know," Cas says, still frowning, so Dean goes on filling up the empty spaces between them.  He whistles while washing the dishes, while cleaning his and Cas's guns, while he's changing the sheets on their bed and rotating their new mattress.  He's pretty sure he's tone deaf.  You'd think the whistling would drive Cas away.  It doesn't.  He turns around sometimes and sees Cas there beside him, sitting on a porch step or perched on a folding chair in the garage, just watching him, patient and enduring.  Sometimes he turns his head and catches Cas smiling.  Maybe they're still fighting.  He doesn't know.  

\--

Sam calls him one night while he and Cas are lying in bed.  Cas has fallen asleep while watching infomercials on the television and Dean is reading, propped up against the headboard with pillows behind his head, peering cautiously through the new reading glasses Cas had forced him to purchase.  "What's wrong?" he asks Sam.

"We had a fight," Sam says.  His voice is full of quiet misery, the kind Dean knows all too well.  "Dean. I did something stupid."

“So what happened?" 

"I left," Sam says.  " I got in my car and drove away.  I left and she didn't want me to go.  We don't know how to fight.  We don't know how to talk.  I don't know what to say.  Dean, what do I do?"

"I don't know."

"We're supposed to be best friends," Sam says miserably.  "It's not supposed to be like this.  It's not supposed to be this hard."

"I don't know what to tell you," Dean admits.  "Sometimes it's just like that. Just hard."

"What do you do with Cas, when things are like that?"

"I fuck it up, usually."

"But he's your best friend," Sam says.  "You are best friends, you know how to talk to each other. You know what to say. You know him inside and out.  Don't you?"

"It's not the same as just being best friends," Dean tells him.  "It's different. It's harder."  He thinks about it.  He thinks he should tell Sam the truth of it.  He thinks he should say,  Sometimes I don't know what to say to him. Sometimes I don't know what to do.  Sometimes I think I don't know him at all.  "I don't know," he says again.  He looks over and watches Cas, asleep in the bed beside him.  His face is turned towards Dean, even in sleep.  Cas isn't snoring,  but he does drool a little, over the pillows, on his t-shirts, on Dean's arms and chest and shoulder.   I am, Dean thinks suddenly, a very lucky man.  The luckiest man.  

Sam is quiet for a long time.  "I don't know how to be married," he says eventually.

"I don't either," Dean says.  

"Do you think you'll ever know?"  Sam asks.  He sounds serious.  He sounds like he means it.  

Dean suddenly thinks about reaching across the kitchen table and taking hold of Cas's hand some quiet evening and saying  _You know, we should get married_.  It doesn't sound wrong or uncomfortable or strange. It doesn't even sound that hard.  They fight like cats and dogs.  They cook each other meals.  They shout at each other over the electricity bill, they kick each other out of the bed and then get up in the middle of the night and pad down the hall to the couch and drag them back to bed.  He already has, for better or worse, what some people would call a marriage.  He closes his eyes and he can see it, just like that, _getting married_ , he can see the rings and ties and stained glass windows, he can see himself kneeling between Cas's knees and buttoning up his shirt.  He can see himself doing all that.  He can see himself, the luckiest man in the whole damn world, probably.

"Sam," he says.  "Sam, just go home. "

 --

Cas leaves.  He is gone for three days, but then Dean comes home one day and Cas is on the roof.    Dean hears him before he sees him, wild dark hair sticking up over the edge of the roofline. He thinks they might still be fighting. He isn't sure.  But it does his heart good to see Cas perched above the roof of the porch with a hammer in his hands, pounding away with what’s either grim determination or stoic enthusiasm.  With Cas, the two are interchangeable.  He’s holding nails between his teeth. Dean also appreciates the way the tool belt strapped round his waist is dragging his jeans down.  They might be fighting, but Dean discovers within himself an uncontrollable need to climb up the ladder and kiss Cas right there on the roof.  Cas doing this means something, Dean knows.  Cas's hands will be stiff and aching for days afterward.

Cas kisses him back, but then he pulls away.  He regards Dean warily.  “I brought you beer," Deans tells him. They sit on the roof together.  He opens Cas’s beer for him thoughtlessly and hands it to him.  “Thanks,” Cas says.

“Anytime.”

Cas is staring at the bottle in his hand. "We're still fighting," he states.

"Yup."

"What are we fighting about?"

"I don't know," Dean confesses.  "A lot of little things, I think.  Maybe a few big things too."

"I  _tried_ ," Cas says slowly, "I _tried_  to do what was right.  I stayed here, with you.  I thought that was all I needed to do."

“What, you think you just have to make one big gesture and that’s it? Game over? It doesn’t work like that, Cas.  It’s little things.  It’s everything. Everything I do, everything I’ve done in the past year has been for you. And you don’t care. I wish you did.  Just a little bit. Just enough to do the things I ask you to do. You won’t even do something as small as that. "

He presses his hands down on the burning heat of the roof and tries to figure out what to say.  He has tried to explain it to Cas, as best he can.  This is how I love you, Dean tries to say, in making coffee.  In buttoning shirts.  In the dinners he cooks every night.  Letting Cas hare off alone whenever he feels like it, letting Cas take over the garage with all his junk.  That’s what he means by love.  He doesn’t know how else to put it in terms Cas might grow to understand.  He doesn’t know how to explain it any better than that.  He thinks that whatever this is between them, it has to be more than choosing life over heaven, life over death.  One lifetime, over eternity. They ought to be making something out of this life, then, not just going along forever, accepting the way things are.   "We’re not just roommates, you know," he says finally. "You can’t just come and go without thinking of me."  

Cas looks reflective.  "You gave up heaven for a lifetime with me," Cas says.  He glances at Dean sideways.  "You could have been happy there.  You could have found Sam. You could have shared it with him."

“Sam loves me. He doesn't need me.”

“I need you.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t realize,” Cas says.  He sounds funny.  He sounds lost.  “Until I left.  How much I did.  I’m here now. That’s all I know how to do.  Just to be here.”

"So be here," Dean says.  "All we’ve got is this life, Cas.  So how about you come live it with me?”"

"Okay," Cas says.  

He looks at Cas, and Cas looks at him.  He looks at Cas sitting there, looking so pleased with himself, with wind in his hair and the sun in his eyes and crinkles in the skin by his mouth when he’s smiling.  Cas, leaning back against the roofline, a beer in hands; Cas, smiling back at him. Dean looks at him and thinks, I did that. I put that smile there, and in a moment of clarity, he gets it.  It's moments like this one, when they are smiling at each other, perfectly in sync, perfectly happy.  He and Cas will always be at odds with each other.  There will always be fights, they will always fall out of sync.  But then again, there will always be moments like this. That's what keeps him carrying on. For every moment like this.  Every once in a while he and Cas will just fall together. They always come back to each other, just like this.

"Are we good?" he asks Cas, who takes a sip of beer.  He looks reflective.  

"Not always," he says comfortably.  "But we have our moments."

\--

There’s sunlight on this motel room's cracked plaster walls, there’s sunlight on the sheets.   He wakes up and stretches and feels fresh bruises all along his side, all over his skin.  He feels the sting of new cuts on his arms and chest, Cas's careful, shaky stitches tugging at the seams.  He yawns and flinches; the skin on his face is broken.  He is sprawled across their bed with his head on Cas’s chest, with Cas's fingers running through his hair and drifting down the side of his face, his shoulder, his arm.  Cas has not fared any better from yesterday's hunt.  Cas’s hands are starting to look different.  Dean sees for the first time in the morning sunlight across those crumpled linen sheets.  He picks up one of those hands, pulls it close to his face to examine it.  Cas's hands are twisting and crooked and Cas moves them carefully when he picks things up, when he touches Dean.  

Dean looks up at him, upside down, and it is as though his world turns on its head.  He is blindsided by a sudden furious overwhelming sense of joy.  He reaches up to put his hand on the side of Cas’s face, to run his fingers through Cas’s beard.  “You’re getting old,” he says.

“I am not,” Cas says serenely, but he is, Dean can tell, and it makes him feel light all over.  Cas is getting old.  He is, too.  They are growing old together, just like in the fairy tales, just like Dean has always imagined this thing called _afterlife_ to be, whatever you want to call it; ever after, after everything, after all.  Dean rolls over and crawls on top of Cas and has an overpowering desire to bury his face against Cas's chest until he's burrowed inside his ribs, close by his heart.  

Dean runs his fingers along the skin underneath Cas's jeans, and Cas makes a martyred little huffing sound and puts his face in the pillow.  "Dean," he sort of mumbles.  Dean presses his nose into the sweaty curls on the back of Cas’s neck and lets his fingers brush against the rough curls at the base of Cas’s cock.

Cas doesn't say anything for a while. When he does, he takes a deep breath. “I can't do it,” he mutters.

Dean feels too good to be alarmed. “Do what?”

“Undo your buttons. Take off your shirt.”

“That's okay,” Dean says. “I can do that. No problem.”  Growing old together means doing shit like this for the rest of his life.  Dean doesn't mind, not even when Cas will happily accept a hand job, then roll over on his side of the bed, eyes drifting shut, and refuse to reciprocate on the grounds that his hands hurt.  Yeah, Dean had said to that, disbelieving but not really minding, un-huh.

Cas sticks his face in Dean’s neck and huffs warm breath down his collar and sort of melts all over him, fingers hooked through his belt loops and then sliding under his waistband.  He shoves his face in Dean’s shirt, and places his hand on the back of Dean’s head.  It’s oddly comforting.  He drags his bead over Dean’s chest, turning his head back and forth.  “You don’t have to do this alone," he’s saying.  “You could talk to me, you know.  You can tell me when something's wrong."

“Everything's always wrong.”

“Everything," Cas says.  "Damn.”

“Yeah.”

Dean slides under the blankets, under the sheets, gets down to where he can bury  his nose in the dark curls, where he can slip his hands down Cas’s thighs and under the backs of his knees and draw his legs up.  He takes Cas in his mouth, feels Cas sigh and arch up underneath him. Cas’s shirt slides up and the soft skin of his stomach is warm against Dean’s forehead. Dean lets his hands roam under Cas’s shirt, over his chest and down his sides and Cas lies there and lets himself be touched and turns his head to the side.   

"No," Cas says finally.  "No, not everything.  Not this."

"That's why I wanted to get this right," Dean says.  

"You are," Cas says.  "I think.   _Oh."_

That nightCas doesn’t leave.  Dean knows.  He wakes up and he knows rightaway that's something different.  Something's changed. Dean listens closely, but he can't hear it anymore.  The silence is gone.  Maybe it's because Cas is lying with his hand on Dean’s chest, with his fingers wrapped around the edges of Dean's shirt.   Maybe it's because Cas looks at him and when their eyes meet, he gives Dean a small smile, as though they're sharing some private inside joke.  Then Cas leans over and brushes his lips by Dean's ear, and Dean finally hears the difference.  He feels Cas's breath tickle the side of his neck.  He’s whistling.

“You’re whistling,” Dean says in surprise.  “How come?” The corner of Cas’s mouth drifts up in one of those funny little smiles.  His chest feels tight and aching, when he sees the look on Cas’s face, when Cas glances up and gives him this dopey look, half-squint, half-smile.  Dean finds himself  thinking, Yes, I love you.  I do love you, after all.  All this time he’s been half-afraid he has been telling Cas a lie, a half-truth: I love you, but only sometimes.  I love you, but only when you need me.  I love you, but only like this.  I love you, but not like this.  I love you, but... Yeah, no buts. I love you. Nice to know.  

“Well,” Cas says.  “I just felt like it. It’s a good morning for it.”

Happy, he thinks, something you do when you're happy.  This is what he’s waited for.  I’d wait for this, he thinks.  I’d have waited forever for this. I'm glad I did.   In this moment, he'd be perfectly content to let Cas go on practicing that tuneless whistle in his ear forever.  “Yeah,” Dean says.  “It’s a good morning."

 --

Later Dean helps him carry his bags out to the Nova, and they stand in the motel parking lot for several long quiet minutes, leaning in close to each other, leaning up against the sun-warmed metal of the car.  He feels Cas’s tentative hands at his hips, Cas's nose tucking in the back of his neck.  He doesn’t move.  He doesn’t want Cas to move away.  “You like me or something?” he asks.

“Or something,” Cas agrees.  He winds his arms around Dean’s waist.  Dean can feel a light breath of air on the back of his neck.  Cas, whistling.  He closes his eyes and imagines moments like this one, moments when it's almost as though their hearts and souls and spirits are all aligned, everything exactly where it ought to be, spread out over a span of years, decades.  A lifetime.

"I should go," Cas says finally.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Dean says.  He turn around in Cas's arms and takes Cas’s face between his palms and kisses his eyes, the bridge of his nose, and Cas is blinking at his touch; Dean can feel the brush of his eyelashes against his cheek.  He rubs his cheek against the side of Cas's and Cas sways in his arms as he runs his cheek along Cas’s stubble, kisses along the curve of his ear, and when he finally brings his mouth down to meet Cas’s, it feels like home even though they're far from it.

“This is nice,” Cas is saying.  He’s standing there and Cas is standing there and he doesn’t want to move.  If he could stay in this moment for eternity, he wonders if he might not end up being happy, ever after, after everything.  After all.  Eternity's not an option, but he likes to think about it anyway.  He will die one day, and so will Cas, and maybe they’ll even be laid to rest next to each other, or have their ashes covering the same ground.  He sticks his nose in Cas’s hair and says, “I don’t want you to go.”

“Me either.”

Cas stands so still, hardly breathing, and his smile grows under Dean's lips.  He holds Cas a moment longer, then releases him, but Cas does something strange; he stays close by Dean’s side, pressed up against him.  “I’ll be home soon,” he says.  

“Yeah.”  

Cas is walking back to the Nova, his keys jingling in his pockets, but before he gets in he turns back around, and Dean sees him: standing there with his aviators covering his eyes and his hair sticking straight up in the wind and he’s waving back at Dean, whistling as he drives away.  

\--

He hears that whistle for days afterward.  

Instead of feeling like he’s alone even with Cas there, he fees like Cas is by his side even when he’s nowhere in sight.   He still hears Cas whistling even when he’s not there: in the car next to him, even with Cas on the other side of the state.  He hears it all the way to South Dakota, hears it over the hum of tires on the asphalt, over the radio.  

He hears it close by his ear, first thing in the morning; he falls asleep with that whistle still soft and present close by his ear.  

He hears it again three days later.  He hears it in the creak of the porch step, coming in through the open window, just over the sound of Cas’s boots skidding across the kitchen floor.  He hears it drifting down the hall, through the bedroom door, then by his cheek as Cas presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth.


End file.
